India: A Whole Other World of Words

I could tell you that India's literacy rate has grown from 12% in 1947 to 74% in 2013, but that's something you google.  Though it was only a week I spent in Vrindavan, a small town in the Mathura area of Utar Pradesh India, I've been somewhat absorbed in the country since childhood, since before I could read or even speak, though I still can't read or speak any of the languages of India.  Though Hindi is the official language, English is stated as the nation's second, and besides these Bengali, Manipuri, and Sanskrit are also in use.  It's a country of words and songs, dances that pose meaning akin to sign language using the entire body.  It's a place of stories, a place where the most popular Indian film offered on Air India's flights is "The Adventures of Vishnu", stories, and books, and poetry have been with the land for longer than most other parts of the world, yet you would be less than likely to have a chat with your rickshaw driver about the exploits of Hamlet, or the woes of Mr. Darcy, let alone the curiosities of Oedipus Rex.  But The Vedas are over five-hundred years old and have been taught for longer, and much of The Vedas is what the people are still familiar with, along with, of course, many other works of literature from India and around the world.

However, what I noticed the most about books, and reading, and stories, and language in India is that the history, the religion, and the stories that children fall asleep with and reenact in the day are one and the same.  Many could read of course, but those who couldn't were still moderately fluent in English and were familiar with ancient Sanskrit texts even if they couldn't be read.  Explaining it is difficult, but in a place like Vrindavan you go to a place, and the story is in the ground you walk on and it's told by the people walking on it.  They take the histories and stories and songs of their land to be one and the same, and you get the same feeling on the banks of the Yamuna that you get looking at The Magna Carta, except amplified, you are so close to something so old with so many emotions and stories and people that were a part of it, except in a museum you can only look, but when you're in the place you touch and smell and see the same parts of the stories you've grown up hearing.

Though their literacy rate isn't the highest, it's a nation that craves education, and loves and remembers some of the oldest epic poems in the world's history, for it's a culture that thrives on the art of telling stories to remember their history.